Cooking

Cooking is the process of preparing food by use of heat, or through chemical reactions without the presence of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions.

Oh, better no doubt is a dinner of herbs,
When season'd by love, which no rancour disturbs
And sweeten'd by all that is sweetest in life
Than turbot, bisque, ortolans, eaten in strife!
But if, out of humour, and hungry, alone
A man should sit down to dinner, each one
Of the dishes of which the cook chooses to spoil
With a horrible mixture of garlic and oil,
The chances are ten against one, I must own,
He gets up as ill-tempered as when he sat down.

He that will have a cake out of the wheat must needs tarry the grinding.
Have I not tarried?
Ay, the grinding: but you must tarry the bolting.
Have I not tarried?
Ay, the bolting: but you must tarry the leavening.
Still have I tarried.
Ay, to the leavening: but here's yet in the word "hereafter" the kneading, the making of the cake, the heating of the oven and the baking: nay, you must stay the cooling too, or you may chance to burn your lips.

Great pity were it if this beneficence of Providence should be marr'd in the ordering, so as to justly merit the Reflection of the old proverb, that though God sends us meat, yet the D— does cooks.

Cooks' and Confectioners' Dictionary, or the Accomplished Housewife's Companions, London (1724).

Hallo! A great deal of steam! the pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that. That was the pudding.

Attributed erroneously to Mrs. Glasse. In Cook Book, pub. 1747, said to have been written by Dr. Hill. See Notes and Queries, Sept. 10, 1859, p. 206. Same in La Varenne's Le Cuisinier Français. First ed. (1651), p. 40. Quoted by Metternich from Marchioness of Londonderry—Narrative of a visit to the Courts of Vienna. (1844).

Digestion, much like Love and Wine, no trifling will brook:
His cook once spoiled the dinner of an Emperor of men;
The dinner spoiled the temper of his Majesty, and then
The Emperor made history—and no one blamed the cook.

The waste of many good materials, the vexation that frequently attends such mismanagements, and the curses not unfrequently bestowed on cooks with the usual reflection, that whereas God sends good meat, the devil sends cooks.

This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is—
A sort of soup or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo;
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace;
All these you eat at Terre's tavern,
In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.

"Very astonishing indeed! strange thing!"
(Turning the Dumpling round, rejoined the King),
"'Tis most extraordinary, then, all this is;
It beats Penetti's conjuring all to pieces;
Strange I should never of a Dumpling dream!
But, Goody, tell me where, where, where's the Seam?"
"Sire, there's no Seam," quoth she; "I never knew
That folks did Apple-Dumplings sew."
"No!" cried the staring Monarch with a grin;
"How, how the devil got the Apple in?"